One Monkey, Seventeen Years

So our player (of high Charisma) finds a dragon egg. He can squash it, and then there will be no dragon! But our player is unimpressed by the skills and risks involved in breaking an egg. So he sets up camp. Soon the egg has hatched, and there's a dragon baby. Spike the dragon baby, and then there will be no dragon! But our player thinks that spiking babies to death is lame. So, dutifully, he waits for the dragon to reach adulthood. Now there is an impressive enemy, a truly skill-requiring and risky fight!
I think a good hero would have made omelettes out of the dragon egg. How can we make that seem more rewarding/exciting?

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Dunno. The camper *does* get maximum XP :-P

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Fear, for I shall impose alignment penalties, and next time the dragon will be created with sufficient stats to burn you to a crisp, and... *realizes that the player isn't easy to scare*

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*grin*

Hey, a dragon with higher stats would yield more XP! Ooh!

Alignment penalties seem to be the usual ones people threaten to impose on me. You know that making me evil wouldn't actually make my life harder, right?

"That's right. Nothing but magic matters to me. I would round up unicorns for Haggard myself if it would increase my power by half a hair. It's true. I have no preferences and no loyalties. Only magic." His voice was hard and sad.

"Really?" she asked, rocking dreamily in her terror, watching the brightness flowing by. "That's awful." She was very impressed. "Are you really like that?"

"No," he said, then or later. "No, it's not true. How could I be like that and still have all these troubles?"

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7a0 Exactly what I was thinking. Though, I have to say, you've gotten to the heart of it in a much more simple (and entertaining!) manner than I would have.

angelbob, this ties in with your not receiving any positive feedback from day to day activities. But I figure you gathered that.

The trick is going to be finding ways to get more positive feedback from handling things *before* they become crises than you would from handling the crises.

Part of that may be in recognizing the costs to you that you aren't factoring in letting things build to crisis proportions. Monetary penalties aren't something that you generally pay attention to. As, unless it's extremely expensive it doesn't rate as that big of a deal to you. So if that's the *only* cost of having waited too long to deal with something, the crisis will give you more feedback.

As for what other ancillary costs you pay in a given choice of omelets vs. fire breathing beast? That's something you'll want to look at. There are other costs. Maybe not in this specific circumstance with the DMV, but in other places this pattern plays out in your life.

If those costs include things that don't rate for you (like say, an extra $20,) that's one thing. Money is easy to see value in and is relatively easy to judge it's worth when compared to other potential costs. But when it pushes into costing you things like time, attention, focus, peace, comfort, or your goals, you do notice it more.

The DMV thing is just evidence of this tendency on your part, playing out in a situation that doesn't cost you as much as, say, it happening in your relationships would.

The first step to changing this will be looking honestly at what it costs you to address situations in this manner. If you're willing to pay those costs, then you don't need to do anything. If you're not, then you need to focus on developing positive feedback to handling the situation before it becomes a crisis.

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Sadly, the only sorts of costs that matter to me in those situations are really hard for me to assess. They're really in terms of other people's opinions and feelings, and getting other people to say anything useful about that is a tricky, error-prone discipline that looks likely to take me a lifetime to get good at.

I could just live in terror of offending people, but my experience with that so far is that it sucks and really doesn't help.

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Since it's been established that for me to have a conversation that deals with you about relationships there may be the need to have a translator present, I'll stick to what I do understand:

This specific situation (wrangling with the DMV) is not complex. It's a simple exercize in cost/benefit analysis. Go for it.

What does it cost you in time, attention, focus and bother to let the DMV problem wait on the shelf so that it can grown into a crisis? What does it cost you in time, attention, focus and bother to handle it before it gets to that point?

What is the benefit for you to handle it as a crisis? What is the benefit to you to not handling it as a crisis?

Are the costs of letting the problem mature worth the benefit? Are the costs of handling it in a timely manner worth the benefit?

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Given the nature of the problem, the costs are all potential - other crises that could become a serious problem if I got into them without clearing this up first. The specific costs of delaying on this, as I actually handled it, were zero. Had I been pulled over before fixing the problem, that would not have been true.

As for time, attention and focus - the time to *fix* the problem is the same regardless. The vast majority of the effort is just getting to the DMV, waiting in line and saying, "I need to fix this."

However, having waited until it was late, and I had to worry about being pulled over and fined heavily (or otherwise being, y'know, obviously more in the wrong than would otherwise be the case), I felt a significant relief at getting it done which I didn't feel when it was just a pending annoyance.

Otherwise, I'd just have felt a general annoyance at having to do it. Which I still felt.

I should really have solved the issue by changing my address to the new one with the DMV long ago. Again. I'm not sure how many pieces of identification I need to do that with, but the answer is at least three, and possibly more, and mail from the DMV isn't allowed to be forwarded.

I'm gonna poke around the DMV web site and see if I can get answers to the questions, "how many vehicles do you think I own? What addresses do you have for me? For which of them have you lost my paperwork so you're still convinced I'm in Mountain View?"

However, that's all annoyance that I'm undertaking to avoid future screwed-up paperwork. If I fix it, it probably entails more checking in the future for screwed-up paperwork, and possibly paying them money for old registration on vehicles I haven't owned for years (we'll see how that one goes - I've had to do that once).

There are possible penalties if I *don't* sort all this out. It's hard to make them really loom ominously in my mind, though, given the certainty of how much of a pain this will be to do right.

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Double check me to see if I get this right:
Costs if handled as crisis:
-Time: 1hr. (my random guess, but since it doesn't change it's kind of academic. )
-Annoyance at having to do it.
-Peace of mind: Immediate concern. Potential for BAD THING hinging on one "if". (If I get pulled over.)

Costs if Handled before crisis:
-Time: 1hr.
-Annoyance at having to do it.
-Peace of mind: Distant concern. Potential for bad thing happening hinging on more than one if. (Nothing bad will happen *right now*, but IF it doesn't get fixed, and IF I get pulled over...)

Benefit if handled as crisis:
-Overcome a crisis. (Whoo! Go me!)
-Got it done.

Benefit if handled before a crisis:
-Got it done.

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Precisely so.

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Are the costs of letting the problem mature worth the benefit? Are the costs of handling it in a timely manner worth the benefit?

Here we go... Emotionally speaking: no and no. But I know I should really do it. This means I'm not figuring "near-certain eventual crisis" as a serious factor in how I feel about these things. I should. I should live in mortal terror of all the stuff that will eventually go wrong if I don't fix problems of this general kind.

I should nail all my bookshelves to the walls to avoid problems with earthquakes. I should do all my paperwork promptly. I should save up a store of money in case I lose my job. There are many, many more "I should"s of this general kind.

However, as far as real, actual consequences: nah, I'm gonna feel lousy no matter which way it goes. I'm doing these things because I know that I should, but it's not like I'm really genuinely motivated to do them.

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I don't think that not factoring in the near-certain eventual crisis is the problem. Lots of people don't have their bookcases bolted to the walls, even in earthquake country. But you can bet that there will be a run on the supplies at Home Depot after the next decent shake.

Nonetheless if that looks likely to work, far be it from me to keep you from trying that possible solution.

From my perspective though:
It's more that you're setting up the crisis, knowing they're developing (because you're not dealing with the situations,) then feeding your sense of accomplishment off of dealing with the crisis, instead of feeling accomplished from dealing with the situation in the first place.

(That's a really horrible run on sentence, I'm sorry.)

If what you've pointed out as far as the costs/benefits is complete, the only difference between the benefits is that of feeling like you've averted a crisis. A crisis that you created by not dealing with it sooner.

Seems... well, kind of unnecessary. Like it's a complication of the problems, to make them more difficult, so you get the feeling of accomplishment. Like you're intentionally making situations more difficult.

Unless you're getting other, less noticeable, things from dealing with it that way.

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(Sorry about the double post.)

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if that looks likely to work

Not really. None of the obvious choices do. The problem with living in fear of stuff that never happens is that I'm too good at ignoring it. I'm not very well equipped, mentally, to live constantly in fear. Eventually I decide living sucks and there's not much that could be made worse. That makes fear pointless, and it dries up and blows away. Once my fear is worse than its consequences, I can't keep it.

Like it's a complication of the problems, to make them more difficult, so you get the feeling of accomplishment.

Something like that. More to the point, the situation where something could have gone wrong feels more like averting a threat. It feels more like consequences are possible for not doing it. It feels more like, y'know, I have an actual stake in the outcome.

I live a lot of my life like I were doing it for somebody else. Bad stuff tends to pretty much roll off my back - not that I don't take the penalties, just that I don't get excited about them, and they don't matter too much to me. I don't appreciate a lot of the good stuff, either, which is part of why I don't care more about things like money. Almost nothing happens that makes my subjective experience of my life much better or worse.

I tend to start feeling disconnected, often. Little in my life has direct consequences - or it has consequences, but I have to pay very careful attention to notice them. That makes it hard to keep concentrating on the day-to-day. Because, subjectively, it pretty much never matters to me. It may eventually matter to me, but I have to go through three layers of "this will cause this other thing which will cause this different thing, probably" to get there.

So when I'm doing complicated stuff that has to be done right in order to keep nothing happening (like, say, DMV paperwork), it's hard for me to stay focused. It's hard for me to keep running through my basic belief that it matters. The only thing really keeping me on task at that point is willpower, because my actual subjective feeling at the time is that any connection between my actions and their consequences is at best tenuous.

Quite a lot of my life feels, subjectively, a lot like a superstition that you don't believe in any more but you go through the motions of anyway. I don't usually keep old superstitions very long - I like changing them out regularly - so it's hard to keep myself on task.

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Great, Noah, you did DMV paperwork. How exciting. Do you realize that normal people don't have these problems? I feel like I'm congratulating you for not wetting the bed. I mean, of course it's good to not wet the bed, but it's generally considered expected and unimpressive by your age...

- Could the type of input you get from your friends help with this?

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Don't know. Not really looking for congratulations. Every so often I describe one of these problems and somebody says, "oh! I went from having your problem to not having it, well after I stopped being a small child, by <doing X>". Mostly I expect that not to happen.

However, every so often somebody surprises me with a genuinely good idea I had not yet considered. One of the nominal reasons that living in human society is better than not living in human society is that people may have advice that makes dealing with problems easier.

I like to give human society the chance rather than just saying, "eh, nobody's gonna be able to help me with this", just on principle. Every so often it surprises me.

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